An Ill Wind

'Two Ton' Toby from the chippy has been having a bit of trouble with the neighbours lately. When I say 'trouble', I don't mean threats of violence, drunken parties, naked tree surgery, or any other sort of anti-social behaviour. No, it's more that 'Two Ton' is feeling a bit victimised - not by poison pen letters, dog shit through the letterbox or similar stuff, you understand, he just feels the local community is over reacting to something he has no control over. Cutting to the chase, old Toby's bowels have been somewhat over active of late. Particularly so early in the morning. It's not so much a dawn chorus his neighbours have been hearing of late, more of a twenty-one bum salute. Except that it's all from one bum. Now, 'Two Ton' claims this is all down to genetics - he reckons his old mum used to regularly blow his old man out of bed every morning, one day the poor bugger mistimed lighting up his early morning fag and a huge fireball blew out the bedroom window and brought the ceiling down - and has nothing to do with his diet. There's no way ten pints a night, rounded off with an Indian has any bearing on the behaviour of his lower intestine, he maintains. Mind you, he has agreed to lay off the bar snacks. I know from personal experience that a couple of pints of Whitbread Best Bitter and a packet of Scampi Fries can have an alarming effect on the digestive tract - stomach bubbling like a cauldron, followed by what felt like a series of miniature nuclear devices being detonated in my underpants. Thankfully, these proved to be low yield in terms of fall out, although they generated an alarming amount of heat.

Getting back to Toby and his neighbours, though, 'Two Ton' didn't think his early hours eruptions were a problem until he noticed that most of the neighbouring houses had started sporting X-shaped tape on their windows. You know the sort of thing - you'll have seen them in war movies. During the blitz they used to have X's of tape on the windows to prevent them from being shattered by the shockwaves from exploding bombs. I told him he was being paranoid, it was probably just that his neighbours were a bunch of World War Two re-enactment nuts. A theory which seemed to have some credence when they started putting sandbags up outside their windows and doors. However, when the bloke next door set off a hand cranked air raid siren a couple of mornings later, a few minutes before 'Two Ton' usually let rip, he got really upset. He reckoned that when he looked out of the window, he saw most of his neighbours diving into an air raid shelter the bloke from number twenty-four had built in his back garden. He didn't see any more as his arse began to quiver as the the first stirrings of that morning's bum rattler manifested themselves. Since then, Toby says he's tried to muffle his anal announcements - he tried sitting on the crapper as he let rip, but the porcelain chamber seemed to act like a megaphone and just amplified the noise. What upsets 'Two Ton' most is that, in his opinion, he's the only one who is actually suffering as a result of his over active bowels. He reckons that the vibrations have dislodged several tiles from his roof and cracked two window panes. I'm not convinced, though. I have tried to point out to him that he's regularly been setting off car alarms up to half a mile away with his bottom trumpet antics. To be honest, I told him, he should think himself lucky that his neighbours haven't bought time on TV to broadcast a 'fart alert' during the seven o'clock commercial break on GMTV. He wasn't amused.